The afterlife

My thinking is, if there is an afterlife, it is probably as different from this state of being as this from the womb -- so different that asking whether your late grandfather is happy or miserable is as meaningless as asking whether he is orange or twelve.

I don't think you see loved ones and all that. I don't think you care because it doesn't matter. I think you're perfectly happy and the fate of others is of no concern.
In the other place I think you're probably very aware and that's the curse. You spend eternity knowing every single thing you can never ever have because of your sins.

I've heard a similar thing said about aliens. When they show up they'll be so strange to us that even the concept of "understanding" them will start to seem pretty meaningless. Difficult one to wrap your head around.

Lascivity said:

I've heard a similar thing said about aliens. When they show up they'll be so strange to us that even the concept of "understanding" them will start to seem pretty meaningless. Difficult one to wrap your head around.

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Well, I don't know about that. Aliens would be animals, like us, and the needs and desires and interests of animals, even intelligent ones, are not difficult for us to understand. Vertebrate or invertebrate, carbon-based or silicon-based, animals are animals.

The only hope at an afterlife is to live a good, meaningful life and touch others so that when you die, they think of you and speak of you and smile. That's the closest to heaven anyone is going to get.

You're born. You live. You die. The end. This afterlife bullshit gives the impression that you get a do over. You don't. You don't live on. You don't get to come back. You don't get to see Grandma. She's dead, and when you die, you will also be dead. The end.

Generic_chick said:

The only hope at an afterlife is to live a good, meaningful life and touch others so that when you die, they think of you and speak of you and smile. That's the closest to heaven anyone is going to get.

You're born. You live. You die. The end. This afterlife bullshit gives the impression that you get a do over. You don't. You don't live on. You don't get to come back. You don't get to see Grandma. She's dead, and when you die, you will also be dead. The end.

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^^^this

I take great comfort from knowing that when I kick the bucket, I'm never being reunited with my relatives.

Generic_chick said:

The only hope at an afterlife is to live a good, meaningful life and touch others so that when you die, they think of you and speak of you and smile. That's the closest to heaven anyone is going to get.

You're born. You live. You die. The end. This afterlife bullshit gives the impression that you get a do over. You don't. You don't live on. You don't get to come back. You don't get to see Grandma. She's dead, and when you die, you will also be dead. The end.

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This is also pretty much how I see it, but I guess more nilistically?

No matter what you do, in about 2 generations, no one is going to know about it. Even if you're famous, they won't remember you, they'll remember some cleaned-up legend worth making movies about or whatever.

Nothing you do REALLY matters- so putting a bunch of bullshit restrictions on yourself makes no sense. As long as you aren't hurting other people, do what you want. All those people who made fun of you or tried to hurt you are going to die one day, and they're going to fade away too, and it'll be like none of it ever happened. Accepting that there's no afterlife frees you to really experience life.

CandiCame said:

This is also pretty much how I see it, but I guess more nilistically?

No matter what you do, in about 2 generations, no one is going to know about it. Even if you're famous, they won't remember you, they'll remember some cleaned-up legend worth making movies about or whatever.

Nothing you do REALLY matters- so putting a bunch of bullshit restrictions on yourself makes no sense. As long as you aren't hurting other people, do what you want. All those people who made fun of you or tried to hurt you are going to die one day, and they're going to fade away too, and it'll be like none of it ever happened. Accepting that there's no afterlife frees you to really experience life.

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Title text: Why can't you have normal existential angst like all the other boys?

Kirkrapine said:

Title text: Why can't you have normal existential angst like all the other boys?

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CandiCame said:

This is also pretty much how I see it, but I guess more nilistically?

No matter what you do, in about 2 generations, no one is going to know about it. Even if you're famous, they won't remember you, they'll remember some cleaned-up legend worth making movies about or whatever.

Nothing you do REALLY matters- so putting a bunch of bullshit restrictions on yourself makes no sense. As long as you aren't hurting other people, do what you want. All those people who made fun of you or tried to hurt you are going to die one day, and they're going to fade away too, and it'll be like none of it ever happened. Accepting that there's no afterlife frees you to really experience life.

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I think that what I do does matter and that I should set a good example of how to behave for my offspring. Because I don't have a prescribed code book, I have to make my moral decisions based on reality and outcome and greater good. That doesn't come easily or naturally. You owe it to your child to give them the tools to assess how to manoeuvre in the world without leaving a trail of dead bodies in their wake. Nihilism has always seemed a little too everyone for themself to me, and I'm not really down with that.

Generic_chick said:

I think that what I do does matter and that I should set a good example of how to behave for my offspring. Because I don't have a prescribed code book, I have to make my moral decisions based on reality and outcome and greater good. That doesn't come easily or naturally. You owe it to your child to give them the tools to assess how to manoeuvre in the world without leaving a trail of dead bodies in their wake. Nihilism has always seemed a little too everyone for themself to me, and I'm not really down with that.

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Nihilism is great for kids!

It's very much, "Do whatever you want! Follow your dreams! If you fall, come back here and regroup- as long as I'm alive, you'll be able to do that- and then get back out there and follow your new dream!"

Of course, I was blessed to have a kid who's dream wasn't to torture animals or anything, but I think most people are.

It's not really about pretending that consequences aren't a thing. Like fire still burns and shit- it's about understanding that no one can keep you down, because they simply don't matter. No one is better or worse than you are-

Which is actually great for morality. Once they learn that authority is a sham- which with my kid was innate- then they start picking up on the fact that inequality exists and there's... no reason for it to. Especially if we don't have an afterlife. There's no reason for, as an example, hoarding wealth while people are starving. If you think that your actions have long-term consequences on an individual level, you're willing to hoard shit because it's you "legacy". If you don't, then you're more willing to help other people- because we're all just hungry, confused, eager animals hurling toward the grave- we all have that in common, and nothing can strip it from us- not paywalls, not language barriers, not arbitrary geographical lines.

When nothing you do matters, you live without judgement, and when you live without judgement, you can free yourself from petty bullshit and can focus on REAL bullshit. Optimistic nihlism is the kindest philosophy I've ever found, because the TENANT of it is that this life is all we have, and nothing matters. So it only makes sense to make life as awesome as we can, for everyone. If nothing matters, you can't really be selfish- you won't have any meaning in life. You can only derive meaning from the pleasure that you get during this lifetime by affecting the people that you know and hoping that those overall social trends change for a time.

There's a thing called the "principle of least suffering" that we can try to live by if we give up the idea of an afterlife where suffering will be rewarded with god points or whatever. You're forced to CONFRONT the idea that those kids wasting their lives in sweatshops- don't get another life. That's all they have, and you're contributing to the system that is fucking them. So you stop. You give up on fast fashion and start making your own clothes. Because we're all just animals moving towards the grave. And now you KNOW it. You don't get to be selfish anymore, because your actions have no lasting consequences- only immediate consequences. Nothing you do matters, so you don't have the luxury to pretend that it does- you HAVE to give every decision meaning in the moment.

The meek might inherit the earth, but we the loud optimistic nihilist can give them an earth worth having. No one will remember you, no one will remember what you did, and it will be like none of it ever happened. But as a swarm, if everyone accepted that and started living by the least suffering principal, we could change social trends in such a way that there would be less suffering in the world. We wouldn't have a legacy, probably wouldn't even have lasting change- but it'll be good for the little bit that we're here. And we're here for the good time, not the long time.

Edit: Btw, I found that after I got a lot of therapy and was able to think clearly- moral decisions actually do come REALLY easily to me. I had always been right, but I had been letting society pressure me. It really did become a "follow your heart" thing. All I really had to do was get my shit together- that was hard, but only because life KEPT shitting on me and it took me a while to find the right meds- but it was never because I made the wrong decision. It was usually because I made the right decision and didn't have the money for it or whatever.

It's pretty freeing to find out that you were right all along, and just had more bullshit than you were able to deal with. "Ran out of spoons", as they say.

Kirkrapine said:

My thinking is, if there is an afterlife, it is probably as different from this state of being as this from the womb -- so different that asking whether your late grandfather is happy or miserable is as meaningless as asking whether he is orange or twelve.

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I've thought on this a bit. What happens to our consciousness when we die? Does it just cease to exist? Or does it get ground up and fed back into the system like our bodies do? The universe abhors and limits the destruction of anything (what seems to be destroyed is usually just disassembled down to the atomic level and then reabsorbed into something else) and recycles damn never everything.

Just a thought.


Comshaw

I have the cheery view that....there is no afterlife. The end is the end. The candle burns out....nothing but darkness, eternal sleep, the void. Ceasing to be.

It's the Satanist view of having only one life to live so make it count.

Purple.

42.

There is no afterlife. Death is what gives life its meaning. If you need the promise of eternal life or the threat of eternal damnation to live a moral life, then you are immoral.

You only live once but if you do it right once is enough.

Energy can neither be created nor destroyed.

Nature recycles everything.

adrina said:

Energy can neither be created nor destroyed.

Nature recycles everything.

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Sure. The molecules oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus that makes up 99% of your body will be incorporated into the environment, not destroyed.

The particular synaptic pathways that make you, you lose their particular configuration.

Until technology can imprint your configuration on a substrate that is more durable than what it is imprinted on today you get the one unfolding bio-electro-chemical reaction that makes you who you are and nothing else.

BoyNextDoor said:

Sure. The molecules oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus that makes up 99% of your body will be incorporated into the environment, not destroyed.

The particular synaptic pathways that make you, you lose their particular configuration.

Until technology can imprint your configuration on a substrate that is more durable than what it is imprinted on today you get the one unfolding bio-electro-chemical reaction that makes you who you are and nothing else.

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What happens to the energy?

I don't claim to know. But the laws of physics dictate that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. And nature recycles everything.

I don't hold out hopes (or desires) that technology will be able to do that any time soon.

BoyNextDoor said:

Sure. The molecules oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus that makes up 99% of your body will be incorporated into the environment, not destroyed.

The particular synaptic pathways that make you, you lose their particular configuration.

Until technology can imprint your configuration on a substrate that is more durable than what it is imprinted on today you get the one unfolding bio-electro-chemical reaction that makes you who you are and nothing else.

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We are all stardust and all that.

I do actually see a LOT of people use this to try to argue that conciousnesses get recycled with absolutely no backing, so... that's weird.

Having said that, if there really is an afterlife, I hope it's ghosts. Like, I hope I just get to float around haunting stuff ala the Sims. Posses people's refrigerators and freak them right the fuck out.

A little bit of knowledge...

BoyNextDoor said:

There is no afterlife. Death is what gives life its meaning. If you need the promise of eternal life or the threat of eternal damnation to live a moral life, then you are immoral.

You only live once but if you do it right once is enough.

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Comshaw

Generic_chick said:

The only hope at an afterlife is to live a good, meaningful life and touch others so that when you die, they think of you and speak of you and smile. That's the closest to heaven anyone is going to get.

You're born. You live. You die. The end. This afterlife bullshit gives the impression that you get a do over. You don't. You don't live on. You don't get to come back. You don't get to see Grandma. She's dead, and when you die, you will also be dead. The end.

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I thought eating cheese was the closest to heaven one could get. And clean sheets. And an early mark from work

girlsmiley said:

I thought eating cheese was the closest to heaven one could get. And clean sheets. And an early mark from work

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I would rate all of those very high on the heavenly list. I would like to add eating a good home made chocolate eclair if I may.

adrina said:

What happens to the energy?

I don't claim to know. But the laws of physics dictate that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. And nature recycles everything.

I don't hold out hopes (or desires) that technology will be able to do that any time soon.

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What happens to the energy of a lightning strike? The shock when you touch a doorknob? The glow of a firefly?

No! Guys! You know what I'm gonna do?
I'm gonna go boo mediums. Like I'm gonna go to seances and be like, "Booooooo! You suck! Booooooo!"

And they're gonna be like, "What's the ghost saying?"
And she's gonna have to say, "Boo".
And they're gonna be like, "Bullshit."

Also, when people pull out the Ouji board like, "Is there a spirit here?" I'm gonna move the planchet to "no".